Friday, January 13, 2017

A strategy so simple it seemed stupid…until it worked

Somewhere in the blinding goldness of Trump Tower, sometime in the last few years, someone sat down and devised a plan to make a crazy man the next president of the United States.

I don’t know who, specifically, came up with the strategy, but it was impeccable in its simplicity. It was built on two fundamental tenets:

(1)  If you look like a buffoon while saying something outrageous every day you will dominate the 24-hour news cycle, and

(2)  If you immediately and successfully discredit the news media as being dishonest, you can eliminate the only entity that could challenge you and hold you to account for your blathering nonsense.

In other words, if there was no snow, you wouldn’t need a snowplow. If there were no roadblocks, you could travel the open road. If there was no one to say, with credibility, that “you can’t do that,” then you could do that whenever you wanted, and the more you did it, the more they’d say you couldn’t, and that meant you'd get even more publicity for doing it and for being “unconventional” at a time when the conventional was wildly unpopular.

You could lie and get away with it because when the other party called you a liar it was “just politics,” and when the media called you a liar, you just turned it around and said it was the media that was telling the lies. Before they could go to air or print with reality, you could use the immediacy of Twitter to distort the facts your way. That’s called “getting ahead of the story” and Trump (or somebody) found a way to use it to perfection. 

It was a plan so simple that it appeared stupid at first, which proved to be the perfect way to play to the stupidity of the disaffected American electorate.

Too harsh?

I don’t think so. You can call it what you want – voter apathy, disinterest, laziness or confusion – but in my book, going to the voting booth unprepared and electing an unstable narcissist to the most powerful job in the world can only be described as stupidity.   

As I have stated here several times, in my opinion, Donald J. Trump is a shallow, childish, vacuous, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist con man tax evading sexual predator who’s also a pathological liar with dangerous, Fascist-inspired ideas and a probable mental illness. What part of that screams out “leader of the free world?”

He is also one week from becoming our next president, and if he hasn’t done anything yet to scare the living hell out of you then you really are stupid or you haven’t been paying attention. Just this week, he continued down a path where he questions the loyalty, competence and credibility of the American intelligence agencies while blindly accepting any statement that comes out of Russia as the absolute truth.

This is Russia, where you disagree with the government and you disappear. Forever.

At the same time, he held a press conference that wasn’t really a press conference because he started off by declaring that the latest news is “fake news” and is therefore not to be trusted or worthy of comment (see tenet #2 above). The event was more accurately a platform for his lawyer to tell us how he is going to separate himself from his business empire without actually separating himself from his business empire.

To top it off, with millions of lawyers in America, he trotted out one who works for the “Russia Law Firm of the Year" for 2016. Are you kidding me? He’s rubbing our noses in Russian excrement.

The campaign is now almost complete. Trump is almost the president of the United States and his basket of deplorable cabinet selections has almost been confirmed and the puppet strings that Russia tied on him years ago are still firmly in place.

But none of that matters any longer because in one week we’ll be living in Trump World, where real is fake and fake is real, lies are truth and truth is lies, down is up and up is…well, there really is no “up” that I can see unless someone finds a way to wake us up from this really bad dream.

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